Horse Slaughtering to Be Focus of Senate Hearing
More than five years after horse slaughtering was effectively banned in the United States, the controversial issue is returning to Texas, which was home to two of the nation’s last three such slaughterhouses.
The state Senate’s Committee on Agricultural and Rural Affairs will meet Tuesday to hear testimony on the economic impact of the closure of Texas’ horse slaughterhouses. The testimony comes in the wake of federal officials opening the doors for horse slaughtering to return to the U.S.
Since the federal ban was lifted, new horse slaughterhouses have been proposed in New Mexico, Missouri and Oregon ...
Comments (4)
David Spratt
“Horse slaughter is used by people who don’t want to find a better way,” Dane said. “There’s no more relationship [to the increase of neglected horses] to the closing of the plants than to any other event in history. How can a lack of slaughter cause an increase in problems?”
This is one of the most misinformed statements I have read lately. How can 100,000 unfit, sick , crippled, unwanted,horses or horses that have owners who USED TO BE ABLE to feed and care for them possibly create a problem?
Not exactly like taking a dog or a cat to the shelter for adoption. They are livestock just like cattle, sheep , goats chickens or anything else. I have livestock and all are treated humanly and very well, but the perspective is always there. We do not mistreat any of our animals but the reality is they are being raised for food not as pets. You can buy rabbit at the store,, why not horse meat? The alternative is shoot them, contract someone with a backhoe to dig you a hole for a couple of hundred $ and bury them. I see it all the time. Horses and donkeys have become very hard to get rid of if you have one that for some reason you do not want anymore.
Texas Bookworm
People who have never owned horses should not be making these decisions. They have no clue how much money, time, and effort goes in to raising, maintaining, and training a horse.
Lisa Griffith
David Spratt, are you saying you are raising horses for food? The problem is that most horses are not raised as food, are considered companion animals by the FDA due to the many banned medications that they can receive over their lifetimes. Not to mention the snake venom and demorphin, a substance 30 to 40 times more powerful than morphine that they are finding in race horses and other performance horses in this country (and not by your lowly, just getting by trainer, some of these who pursue the money without ethics are among the top trainers in this country)
I also think you misunderstand Dane's sentence. We had slaughter before 2006 and we still have the same number of horses going to slaughter now, so all the problems that have cropped up since 2006 that the pro-slaughter folks refer to as causing the horse market to tank, can't be because of a lack of the slaughter option. They are clearly due to something else that is causing a strain on the horse community. If you think for a minute, it might be that 1) there are just too many horses for a shrinking number of owners and 2) the long lasting recesssion has affected many former horse owners, race tracks and communities at large. Breeding farms are going out of business and that simply has nothing to do with slaughter. It has everything to do with a shrinking ownership base and the horse community, like the real estate community, has to adjust. Unfortunately, the horses pay the price with their lives. The answer is better training for the horses you have and breeding fewer.
Vickery Eckhoff
David Spratt, the idea that slaughter horses are sick, old rejects reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the kinds of horses the USDA itself says are going to slaughter. 92% of these are healthy, and under 10 years old, with no behavioral problems.
Yes, thousands of horses have been found abandoned and dead/dying, but the only ones that have been identified are slaughter rejects with the tags still on them. We can presume that there was something wrong with the horses that they were not eligible for slaughter. Thinking like a buyer/consumer makes this easier. They want healthy horses, not some sick, old, skinny animal, whether a horse or a cow. Think about it. Would you want your kids to eat that?
Perhaps you would. But your standards for food safety are not the EU's—the ultimate buyer (besides Japan). As of next summer, EU will not buy any US horses/meat whose lifelong drug intake hasn't been fully documented on a passport. They won't just continue rejecting the "unfit, sick, crippled, unwanted horses"—they'll be rejecting the healthy ones that have been slaughtered all along, including racehorses and the majority of regular old riding horses, more than 90% of which have been administered bute—a known human carcinogen. This will result in a wholesale rejection of US horses by the EU. They will simply buy from countries whose horses are drugged less than ours are.
It is clear you don't understand other horse owners. The majority are different than you: they don’t consider their horses livestock. My horse's half brother made more than a million at the racetrack. You want to call that livestock? He wasn’t raised for food, yet upwards of 19,000 Throughbreds just like him have ended up slaughtered. All of them are raised to run—they’re athletes, and highly paid ones, too.
As it stands, he's retired now and is a riding horse. Livestock? You want to call Ann Romney's $250,000 dressage livestock? I understand you raise cattle, sheep, other livestock, and thank you for your contributions to the food supply. But your view of horses as livestock is a minority view. Not an invalid view, but a minority one. Just take that idea to Churchill Downs, or to Saratoga, or to Gladstone, NJ, where the US Equestrian Team has its training center, and tell them their horses are livestock.
You can determine the manner in which you regard your own horses; you do not get to determine that for everyone else, particularly the majority of horse owners who do not consider their horses as livestock and do not treat them as such. You cannot expect them to endorse building slaughter plants using their own tax dollars simply to aid a few people looking to make money on horse meat. That is asking something of your fellow Americans that you would undoubtedly object to if the shoe was on the other foot.
As to Texas Bookworm, 80% of the people in the US strongly oppose horse slaughter. Most don't own horses. But they are tax payers being called on to fund inspections; they have a stake on whether or not their tax dollars are used for programs that benefit them.
We don't eat horse meat. We shouldn't pay to get it inspected, not just to benefit the handful of people that a horse slaughter plant may benefit. Also consider your ultimatum: people who have never owned horses should not be making these decisions, you state. Does that mean that people who have never worked on Wall Street should not demand accountability from the nation’s financial institutions? Some would say yes. As long as we're equating the right to make policy with representation by numbers, you do realize that those who want slaughter constitute the minority of horse owners, don't you?
Horse slaughter makes sense for some people, but not the majority of Americans. If you want to know more, I have researched and written an entire series on the subject for Forbes.com. You read it here: blogs.forbes.com/vickeryeckhoff